Life is Meals

 Life is Meals
 A Food Lover's Book of Days 
James and Kay Salter started writing down recipes and notes about guests they had invited for meals and what was served, gradually the notebook was filled and others started, the content of entries were wider in scope taking in interesting things they had read and anniversaries of food events and of people. In 1999 they started thinking about turning this miscellany of notes and jottings into a book, and by 2006 this volume was published. 
There is an entry for each day of the year and takes us from a "Dinner with Lord Byron" on 3 January, through notes on toothpicks on 20 February, the day a patent was awarded for a machine to make them, to a recipe for Polpettone Alla Toscana on 4 April and a menu for a New Years eve dinner. Via buttermilk, Chinese food, Diamond Jim Brady, the Seige of Paris, Egyptian dinner parties, Casanova, forks and Pompeii, to name a very few of the topics covered. 
Light and delightfully written it is also beautiful to handle. This 2010 paperback edition by Knopf is on good paper and with dozens of wonderful illustrations by Fabrice Moireau.
Great to have ready to dip into whenever there is a spare moment, over a cup of tea ? ;  the hardest thing is to stop being greedy and to put the book down after one or two helpings.
Ref: ISBN 978-0-375-71139-8

Max Dingle                                                                          February 2015
www.maxdingleart.com

Food on the Road

Conference & Book Review

Railway Dining

A conference on the history of dining on railways is to be held in Tours, France on 16 and 17 December 2014, papers will cover railways throughout the world. Ideal for anyone who’s idea of heaven is sipping a fine red over a steak-frites and watching the scenery whizz by.

Contact : jean-pierre.williot@univ-tours.fr  or  laurent.tissot@unine.ch  or  Michele Merger mi.merger@virgilio.it

A Fork in the Road : Tales of food, pleasure & discovery on the road

Editor James Oseland 2013 Lonely Planet ISBN 9781743219775 (Hbk)

Thirty four stories on the joys and other wise of food and travel written by food obsessed writers and chefs from Neil Perry, Curtis Stone, through Madhur Jaffery to Frances Mayes and Michael Pollan. From the delightful first encounter Sandi Tan has when she eats the first food ever cooked by her father’s mistress. “ the rice was mushy, clearly budget-grain and cooked with a drunkard’s care” and “ the squid’s actual taste ... were immaterial, What struck me was that this child-woman had cooked me something cool and different – and seemed mightly tickled at herself for having done it. Chilli-burned, I scarfed down her joy, her unbridled exuberance, and asked for more.” To Tuscany (of course) the Amazon, Colombo and Greece these writer take us on an entertaining and , not always, mouth watering, adventures. The quality of the writing is excellent and, to quote editor James Oseland, each of the essays “says something ineffable about how we process and remember tastes and sensations, and about how they alter our view of the world”.

Max Dingle                                   27 February 2014

http://www.maxdingleart.com/max-blog.html 

The Table Comes First - book review

The Table comes First : Family, France and the meaning of Food by Adam Gopnik   2011
Vintage Books ISBN 978-0-307-47696-8

A really great read that searches for a truth in the meanings we give to food, a search through history, philosophy, literature and culture of our food obsessed world.

                                                                                                             Max Dingle    30 January 2014

Here is an extract:
Cooking is the faith that raw ingredients can be conjured into a nightly miracle.
The oldest of all recorded stories is the story of Enkidu from the epic of Gilgamesh, and it is a story of  the divine power of food, sex and wine to make human.
Enkidu, wild and uncivilized is saved by a prostitute.
"Nothing does Enkidu know of eating bread,
and to drink strong drink he has not been taught." she says
'The whore opened her mouth , saying to Enkidu,
"Eat the bread, O Enkidu, it is the staff of life;
drink the strong drink,
it is the custom of the land."
Enkidu ate bread until he was sated: Of the strong drink he drank seven goblets. His soul was free and happy, his heart rejoiced, and his face shone.....
he anointed himself with oil and at that moment became human.'

In honour of Enkidu and the whore:
The four essential savoury secrets : anchovies, bacon, cinnamon, saffron
The five humble helpers: frozen peas, canned beans, corn syrup, gelatin, cornflour
The three miraculous drugs: sugar, caffeine, spirits

The three basic principles:
1. The rule of triple action : take something to eat, do something to it, do something else to it.
But for goodness sake do not do something else after that, or if you do, it had better be really worth doing.
2. The rule of three and four: almost anything ( salmon, chicken breasts, fish steaks, beef steaks, mushrooms, grilled bread) tastes best if it is sautéed for four hot minutes on one side  and then three slightly cooler minutes on the other.
3. The truth of oven extremes: there is no golden mean behind the oven door - let your oven be very hot or rather cool, but never in between.

The truth of taste : taste is a fiction, shaped by a time. But the fiction is not the barrier to the feeling. It is what gives the feeling force. We make up our tastes as we make up our pesto, and it is the making-up that makes it matter.